The Mystery Traditions on planet Earth have since time memorial focussed upon maintaining the connection between mankind
and our divine origin.
labyrinth in Cornwall
photographs on this page: Hanne Tofte Jespersen ©
An interesting incident occurred during Music for the Mysteries' first day of recording CD at Kongegaarden in Korsør.
The building also hosts an art gallery, and the lady on duty during our first recording day told us by the end of the day that she had again and again come to think of Lord of the Rings when listening to the music we played upstairs.
The music that day happened to be The Seven Natures, composed for a ritual manus by Welsh writer Mike Harris. His script recreates the essence of what the Celtic lore tells about the relation inner and outer and between mankind and fairy.
Mike Harris lives in southern Snowdonia which is the area of many locations of the Arthurian legends. It is also the area where Tolkien chose to stay whilst writing most of Lord of the Rings.
He did so, Tolkien, in a cottage up on the sides of enchanting forest clad highland north west of the mountain Cadair Idris. One can see the cottage when standing outside Mike Harris' home.
Coincidence made it so that the music for The Seven Natures emerged in the very same area. Hanne started the composition when she stayed in that part of Wales in June-July 2007.
In Korsør the year after another person tuned into this when she inadvertently got exposed to the music.
Hand downs bear witness of the mystery traditions and their presence. They are there as ancestors' signs in the landscapes, in mounds and carvings, they sound through songs and tales and emerge in scripts whose source remains hidden.
In the West there are treads leading from ancient Egypt though the Middle East and further up through the Mediterranian area to Celtic culture in the North and North-West.
Like an underlying weaving, traces of a common essence run beneath the history of mankind and the apparent differences between his religions. An essence dealing with the relation between the highest, innermost - God, Spirit - and that realm in which man and woman live their human lives.
Across cultures and different languages, tales and ballads, myths and fairytales tell related stories about connections between this world and another world beyond time. Folklore teems with accounts of meetings between human beings and fairies, little people, elves, dwarfs, winged beings, fabulous monsters, power animals....
Parallel to folkloric wisdom, teachings of wisdom have been carried on through history within closed circles, loges and "secret" societies, "inner circles" both within and outside official exoteric religions and their congregations. Two ingrediences are general:
Magical power and love. Two sides of the same coin.
Concealment is not strange when one considers the many people who throughout millenias have been prosecuted and excommunicated as infidels, heretics, witches and heathens. During the first half part of the 20th century courageous and gifted women and men dared publish scripts and experiences which until then had been carried on in hiding. Midway through the century, Tolkien with his gigantic epos was capable of rewriting the knowledge of the folk soul into a contemporary version of the never ending story about the battle between good and evil.
When it comes to knowledge of handed down scripts, coincidence has several times lent its helping hand during the 20th century. Some of the scripts which Music for the Mysteries has set in music, have appeared by coincidence - as was the case when a shepherd in 1947 stroke some ancient jars in a cave near The Dead Sea. The findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran revealed portions of the traditions which Fathers of the Church had agreed to leave out and forget in the 4th century. Book of Enoch is among these scripts.
Another fortunate coincidence
had some twenty years earlier arranged it so that a number of Essene scrolls came into the hands of the linguist Edmond Bordeaux Székely who were skilled in Aramaic by the time he had got access to the archives of the Vatican.
By the transition into the 21st century the worldwide web has paved a way for the ordinary human being to access the treasuries of traditions. One thing, though, is access - another what one uses and is able to use it for. Years and years of inner work and training still forms the necessary basis for acquiring teachings of wisdom, for traditions speak in symbols and hideous languages, and their code can only be made out through deep inner work.
The common essence under the many varieties deals with the relation and bridge between the inner and the outer. Those two depend upon each other. Both are living participants in the ongoing process of creation.
According to the teaching of the Tree of Life - the Holy Qabalah - one of the many corresponding names of the kingdom of Earth is The Gate.
ruins of Vulci, Etruscan site in Northern Lazio, Italy
Music for the Mysteries reaches inward towards the wisdom in the handed down scripts and traditions and outward towards the reality in which humans and other living beings move in the, according to Western chronology, 21st century.
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Texts for Music for the Mysteries' concerts:
extracts of Mike Harris: The Testimony of Melangell © 1989. Ritual-manus on Celtic / early Christian female saint associated with shrine in Northern Wales. Her name means "honey angel".
Book of the Secrets of Enoch, XXX,11 - scroll text found in caves at Qumran near The Death Sea around 1947.
extracts of Mike Harris: Ritual © 2000 - based on Celtic tradition.
Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) / Aurelius Augustinus (355-430): La Morte non è niente ( Death is nothing)
Vision of Enoch from The Essene Gospel of Peace Book 2
scroll text found in the Secret Archives of the Vatican in the1920'es by Edmond B. Székely (1900-1979) *
liturgical texts from Graduale Romanum, 12. century:
Angeli, archangeli og Dum sacrum mysterium
Tam Lin - Skotch ballad in which Tam Lin, the bonniest knight is freed from his stay with the Queen of Fairy. thanks to young Janet who feared him not and despite all the warnings did not stay away from the well at Carteraugh...
*) Hanne Tofte Jespersen's use of Dr.Székely's translation is by permission of Mrs Norma B.Székely and International Biogenic Society (I.B.S.) who owns the copyright and continues his immense work Székely's more than 80 books incl. The Esssene Gospel of Peace vol.1-4 are available from
I.B.S. P.O.Box 849, Nelson, B.C. Canada V1L 6A5